Never mind the medication, what you need is a good opera

Women who gave birth in sight of a specially designed visual arts screen found their labour time reduced by more than two hours, a conference on arts and health in Sydney heard yesterday.

In addition, exposure to visual art and live music significantly reduced anxiety and depression among cancer patients.

The findings were among a number presented for the first time by two researchers from London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

Susan Loppert, director of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts and Dr Rosalia Lelchuk Staricoff, director of the hospital's arts research project, have recently completed the first clinical evaluation of the effects of visual and performing arts in health care.

The results of the three-year study, completed last year, are expected to be published later this year.");document.write("

advertisement

");
}
}
// -->

The hospital has an innovative arts program, displaying 1000 art works in its wards, operating theatres and corridors and provides regular concerts.

It also has a regular musical program and has staged productions of La Boheme and La Traviata.

Ms Loppert told the conference she wanted to see if anecdotal evidence from medical staff, that art work in anaesthetic and recovery rooms reduced patient stress levels, could be quantified. But her motivation was not prompted entirely out of a thirst for knowledge.

"I needed to be able to provide proof to cautious funders who needed to be convinced that their money would be as well spent on murals or music as on bedpans or CT scanners," Ms Loppert said.

"Reams have been written about the power of music to reach the sick, the comatose and the dying, [but] there has, until now, been no real clinical evidence or scientific measurement of the effects of live music, that most glorious and utilitarian of the arts, used to celebrate, commiserate, commemorate," Ms Loppert said.

The study has implications for length of hospital stay and amount of medication needed, she said.

Opening the conference, the NSW Governor, Professor Marie Bashir, said that as a medical specialist working in primary health care and in child and adolescent mental health, she was constantly confronted with the impact of the physical, emotional and cultural environment on individual health.

Research was emerging on the positive effect of music on the unborn and on improved pain tolerance of cancer patients.

Visual arts, hospital and residential design were emerging as important components in slowing dementia.

"For too long in health services provision, particularly in the more affluent countries, there has been a tendency to depend heavily upon the abundance of expensive pharmaceutical agents ... without taking into account the cultural and spiritual components of wellbeing and health," Professor Bashir said.

Sociologist Dr John Zeisel said using art and music with Alzheimer's patients was part of an integrated approach to their care.

Dr Zeisel, president of Hearthstone Alzheimer Care, a US-based company that provides accommodation for people with Alzheimer's disease, has researched the effects of the physical environment on Alzheimer's and dementia sufferers.

"You can't put patients in a white-walled room and bring Mozart in," he said. "Society has separated out art and culture from our lives. Our approach is to bring back meaning."

The Synergy: Art, Health and Design World Symposium continues at the University of NSW until Wednesday.